Growing Up Suburban

After the busboy job, I worked as a frozen-food stock clerk at a Murry's Steaks store on Rockville Pike. I had to wear gloves and a coat and carried a lot of five-gallon drums of frozen pig intestines to and from the freezer in the back. Working on Rockville Pike had a certain cachet, or so it seemed to me. I used to tell people that "the Pike" was the second most commercially developed strip in the United States. This was an unexamined and probably inaccurate factoid I'd picked up somewhere, but I repeated it while I worked at Murry's, as if the distinction rubbed off on those of us employed amid the Pike's unbounded sprawl.

On the Pike, stores and owners changed each season as new mini-malls were built, discount chains went bankrupt, and fast-food franchisees swapped their brightly colored signs, competing for prime turf. When did the Hot Shoppes Junior across the street from Murry's become an A&W Root Beer stand, and was it before or after I tried and failed to date the girl behind the cash register? I have no idea, but it bothers me that I can't remember whether she wore an orange Hot Shoppes uniform or root-beer-brown and yellow stripes. Later, when my motivation to lug drums of pig intestines lapsed, and I moved on, Murry's -- with its distinctive blue franchise sign depicting a portly butcher -- turned into a yellow Fotomat. I would drive down the Pike, glance at where the store had once been, and wonder if Murry had ever really existed.

I sold hiking boots and blue jeans to fashion-conscious backpackers at Britches Great Outdoors in Montgomery Mall. Here was the epicenter of Montgomery County's developmental volcano during the 1970s. The place was one of the country's first big indoor malls, a harbinger of the national blight. In those days there was a Sears at one end and a Hecht's at the other, although lately a Woodies has come along and attached itself to one side, transforming the commercial architecture of the mall into a tripod. I remember the simpler, bipolar days, when you could walk up and down between the big department stores without getting lost, first on the upper level, then on the lower, smoking and looking for someone familiar. This was before teenage mall mating rituals became well-developed and well-known, before Hollywood took an interest in the subject, and we sensed that we were on the cutting edge, flirting from the railings, discussing and then backing out of elaborate shoplifting schemes, acting surly. Britches is still there, down on the lower level. That figures. Giant indoor shopping malls are the only structures in Montgomery County that appear to be immortal.

The transmigration of Montgomery County's landscape during the 1970s was matched by dislocation in its public institutions, or at least that was the case at T.S. Wootton High School in Rockville, from which I graduated in the bicentennial class of 1976. The school, spanking new and surrounded by freshly sodded fields, had a number of wonderful teachers. It also had big problems then with what is referred to nowadays as "values."

One problem was drugs. During my junior year, an undercover narcotics officer who was balding and wore a beard walked into the smoking area behind the gym and gaped in amazement as 11 students approached and offered to sell him more than $2,000 worth of marijuana, LSD, speed and barbiturates. They made a big show out of the subsequent bust, sending police officers into the classrooms to arrest the dealers in front of their peers. The rest of us were thrilled by the commotion.

Susan King, now a local TV news anchor and then a reporter at Channel 9, ventured to Rockville to work up a multi-part series that touched on the apparent collapse of upper-middle-class civilization in our fast-growing suburban county. In the school driveway where the buses waited to take us home, I remember watching her interview an acquaintance from chemistry class who was accused of selling LSD. He gave long, incoherent answers to her questions, so she finally said, "Billy, you seem a little spaced out right now."

He looked into the camera and replied, "Yeah, I'm tripping." And he laughed. Those of us watching laughed too -- I'm sorry to say that we were proud of our notoriety.

It was possible to be blind to the destructive power of drugs, but murder was harder for us to blithely ignore. One evening during the fall of my junior year, several of Wootton's college-bound students parked a family station wagon across from the school, climbed out and attempted to dislodge a fire hydrant from its moorings. An athlete named Buddy McCracken, who was popular among his crowd, happened by and told them to cut it out. One of the students stuck a shotgun out the car window and blew him to bits. The funeral provoked public hand-wringing about what was going wrong in booming Montgomery County. Nobody seemed to know.

I wanted to flee. In August 1976, two months after graduation, I boarded a Greyhound bus in Washington with a friend who worked in a shoe store at Montgomery Mall. We carried six-week "See America" passes for unlimited bus travel. I had never been west of Chicago, but I had chosen a college in Los Angeles from a catalogue because the map showed it was as far away as possible from Montgomery County. Looking back on it, I think I also homed in on L.A. because from movies and television I could see the place was replete with new and potentially exotic fast-food restaurants with names like Tacoland and Blue Chip Burger.

On that trip west, sleeping in parks and seedy motels, I encountered for the first time the question, "Where are you from?"

I hesitated. "Maryland" seemed inaccurate. Prince George's County -- Greenbelt, Riverdale, Bowie Race Course -- that was Maryland. The harbor in Baltimore, the piedmont around Frederick, the smoky, wooded hills of Hagerstown or Hancock or Cumberland -- those places were Maryland too. There were even parts of Montgomery County that I thought of as Maryland -- the ivied streets of Chevy Chase, Potomac's horse country, the old frame houses in Takoma Park, the pockets of Appalachia near Boyds. But not Rockville, not Gaithersburg.

"The suburbs," I answered.